‘The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay,’ by Andrea Gillies

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By Dylan Landis

May 15, 2015

Nina Findlay, an inquisitive book editor, and Luca Romano, a passionate wine distributor, are a universe of two. They confide only in each other. Constantly, they touch, they glance, they email and call. They clasp hands as if no one else exists. What Nina and Luca have joined together since childhood no one can put asunder, and the fact that they’re married to other people would be, to them, incidental were Nina’s husband not Luca’s elder brother, Paolo.

In her disturbing and sometimes tantalizing second novel, “The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay,” Andrea Gillies peels back decades of Nina and Luca’s bonds and plumbs the heart of marital infidelity. Is it the flesh or the spirit, she asks, that commits true adultery? And if the spirit, what does that reveal about the charged gray area of extramarital friendship — especially in the Facebook age, when texts may fly and laptops hide secrets, their sparks flaring?

Gillies, who is also the author of a mystery, “The White Lie,” and “Keeper,” a memoir about caregiving and Alzheimer’s disease, makes the case here that carnality isn’t the real key to cheating. It can’t be, she suggests, not when Nina and Luca leave that aspect thrillingly unsated for many years. In the world of this novel, we betray our spouses simply by withholding the best of ourselves, by saving it for another. To this end, Gillies extracts heat from both platonic and public acts: Witness Luca slipping his arm around Nina’s vacant chair as if claiming even her shadow.

The novel opens when Nina, who lives in Scotland, has been struck by a minibus on the tiny Greek island where she and Paolo honeymooned 25 years earlier. She’s visiting alone, now that her marriage has finally imploded. Half the novel thus unspools in a hospital room, where the attentive Dr. Christos spends his free time falling for Nina and questioning her closely. Very, very closely.

Strung together, her answers, some of them harrowing memories, reveal that as long as the affair remained technically chaste it was a slippery issue for Nina’s husband, the kinder but more plodding Paolo, never mind for Luca’s wife, Francesca. It remained endlessly alluring, something that wouldn’t burn out like a weekend tryst.

By setting Nina up to be grilled, Gillies forces the otherwise seductive Nina-­Luca-Paolo story to emerge in flashbacks, creating a drag on the narrative. And as Nina lies injured, the book’s unfolding present story comes to feel slightly immobilized itself. A Nina-Christos-Paolo triangle develops to frame the past, but with the patient confined, the enigmatic doctor can serve only as a bedside interrogator and Greek chorus. “Give me Nina at 12 and Nina at 18,” he demands, beginning the call-and-response that forms the novel’s spine. “Yes, your parents. Tell me.” And later, “I want the play-by-play.”

Pining for Nina, he tells her not to mend her marriage. Once broken, love is “like a teacup,” he insists. “You can’t drink tea out of it anymore.” Deeply flawed himself, he still offers the novel’s most moral view. “Even this thing of ours is really adultery of a kind,” he says. “Men don’t have close friendships with women, not really.”

At the end, though, it’s the unelectrifying Paolo, after a quarter-century of biding his time, who quietly pushes the plot to its crisis and resolution. While Nina plays Scheherazade to Dr. Christos, Paolo flies to Greece and takes his turn at the bedside. Why must marriage be a teacup, he demands, as he and Nina analyze their past actions. Once-broken love is, he counters, “an old-fashioned watch with tiny gold workings. . . . very fixable.” The image of care and recalibration applies as well to this novel. With a little adjusting, it could have ticked even more urgently, been more tightly wound.